Gary Wolcott's "Mr. Movie" column has appeared in the Tri-City Herald since 1992. The Tri-City native now lives in Portland, Ore., and watches about 250 movies each year. This member of Portland's association of movie critics, Far From Hollywood, believes movies are made to be seen on theater screens and should be seen there and not on television screens. Have a question for Mr. Movie? Click on "Add Comment" below. Mr. Movie has joined Twitter. Follow him here.
Tense. Intense. Riveting. Hot as the Iraqi desert sun. Name the adjective and it fits The Hurt Locker, a not-to-be-missed action film from director Kathryn Bigelow whose Point Break is one of the all-time best cops and robbers thrillers.
The Hurt Locker follows three soldiers whose job is disarming bombs. And in Iraq, as you know, there are lots of them. They're planted in cars, carts, on the ground, in buildings, underground and even on people. Normal procedure is to use a robot for most diffusing tasks. Jeremy Renner's Sgt. William James is the proverbial loose cannon. On a regular basis he plays cowboy and risks his life and the life of his frustrated colleagues by doing his own thing.
Forget the robot. Man to bomb confrontation is his preference.
Anthony Macie's JT Sanborn and Brian Geraghty's Owen Eldridge just want to stay alive. They like their partner and do their duty but cannot comprehend how little he cares for their wellbeing.
Outside of a scene or two Bigelow and first time screenwriter Mark Boal-who developed the story for the excellent In the Valley of Elah-leave out the politics and take their movie straight ahead.
Bigelow shot this during the real-life Iraqi surge of a few years ago and uses a restless, hand-held camera to twist this way and that and define the intensity of this quiet form of combat. Tick, tock, tick, tock. Every bomb encountered becomes a nail biter.
So is her movie.
The Hurt Locker
Rated R for violence, language. It opens Friday, July 31 at Regal's Columbia Mall 8.
Mr. Movie rating: 4 1/2 stars
5 stars/4 1/2 stars: Must see on the big screen
4 stars / 3 1/2 stars: Good film, see it if it's your type of movie.
3 stars / 2 1/2 stars: Wait until it comes out on DVD.
2 stars / 1 star: Don't bother.
0 stars: Speaks for itself
'Mission: Impossible — Ghost Protocol' best of series
Trying to escape his captors, Tom Cruise’s Ethan Hunt slides down a wire and hits the top of a moving truck.
He flies off the truck and lands hard on a cobblestone street, rolls to the curb, and sits up. Free from his bonds, uncut, unbruised and unfettered, a picture-perfect Cruise, hair dangling slightly over one eye, sits still and ready to spring to the next action sequence.
A Christmas Carol, starring George C Scott. (The Muppet version changes the basic Dickens' story). The movie's message is as powerful today as when Dickens wrote the story. In it, Scrooge learns he has substituted other things for basic human needs: the need to connect and care about others. Scrooge was overly concerned with objects because he had been deeply hurt as a child. He had no mother and his father resented him. Gradually withdrawing from a hurtful life to one of imagined playmates and then to material wealth, it took the three spirits' prodding for Scrooge to see how empty his life had become.
This is a message relevant to all of us. We all get hurt, some more than others, by our relationships. How easy is it, rather than deal with the pain and the difficulty of building new relationships, to retreat into a world of food, shopping, computer games or workaholism. I try to watch this movie every year at the start of the Christmas season. What is more important to me? My family and friends and others
Young Adult re-teams director Jason Reitman with Juno writer Diablo Cody. They craft a semi-serious, semi-comic tale of a struggling, self-absorbed 30-something woman.
Charlize Theron is marvelous as Mavis, a woman on a quest to find truth, happiness and a personal and self-focused holy grail.
Billy Bob Thornton says his frustration at the state of films in America prompted him to direct his first feature in more than a decade, the 1960s family drama "Jayne Mansfield's Car."
Kudos to Battelle Film Club for bringing 'The Hedgehog'
The Hedgehog is a subtitled French film from 2009 that finally got released in the U.S. last year, and thanks to the Battelle Film Club , it will be seen in the Tri-Cities.
The story centers around Paloma, an 11-year old girl whose interests are philosophy and art.
No one in her family can relate. Her parents barely speak to each other much less to Paloma. The disconnected mom talks to plants, and the psychiatrist but can’t talk to her daughter. Dad is nowhere to be found.
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